Making Better Lives for Expats in India: Two friends with humble backgrounds make it big in foreigner’s travel industry

NEW DELHI: It’s an inspirational story of two young lads – one from a poor farmer’s family in Haryana, and another with underprivileged background from a Punjab village, with no formal or professional education and financial backup. The duo quit their BPO jobs, and together started their micro venture in expats mobility with a tiny amount saved out of their salaries.

Now, their travel solution firm with a client base of about 210 Japanese companies and some Korean ones, employs over 100 people, and reigns an empire of over 2000 cars in its network across the lengths and breaths of India. This professionally managed travel management company offers travel solutions such as car rentals, MICE, forex, air-ticketing, accommodation, relocation, visa, and FRRO services to expats.

And all that happened in a small span of time of eight years only. Now, their company KURUMA Travels is all set to grow from the present annual turnover of INR 23 Crores (US$ 3 Million) to INR 100 Crores ( US$ 13 Million) by the year 2024-25 and is roaring to diversify to serve other expats communities in India.

Bijendra Singh Kadyan, a first-generation self-made entrepreneur, and Managing Director of KURUMA Travels Pvt Ltd comes from a humble background from a village in Sonipat (Haryana) abutting New Delhi, and life for him served nothing less than a mere struggle in the beginning.

“I had to face 110 interviews to fetch my first job as I was a simple graduate with poor conversational abilities, both in Hindi and English because of my rural background. Somehow, I secured my first job in a domestic BPO (Business Processing Outsourcing) in Gurgaon. In the due course, I improved my communications skills and managed to get next job in an international BPO where I learned the basic nuances of sales, collection, inbound and outbound customer services, etc.” recalls Singh.

Through his sheer hard work and dedication, he was promoted to Team Lead in his next company NIIT handling SAP operations.

“It was in 2013 when our company cab driver casually shared an idea of starting a transportation service for Japanese nationals who were facing bad experiences of poor service, cheating, unprofessionalism, and other issues. I discussed this with my old-time buddy and room-mate Vivek Sidhu who was with me for ten years since college days and we worked in the same company too. Both of us decided to fill this huge gap in this service industry.”

At this point, Bijendra Singh and Vivek Sidhu, who also comes from an underprivileged family from Bhatinda in Punjab, formed a company KURUMA Travels at their home address only, and started car rental for Japanese expats. KURUMA means Car in Japanese language.

“So, from day one, we defined our target audience which was the Japanese community as our clients. We researched and found that at that time the travel industry for expats was not organised and it was dependent largely on the mercy of scattered individual car rental providers or small companies. Cheating, wrong agreements, over-charging from clients, and not meeting deadlines were some of the loopholes we identified and decided to address the same. It was also creating a bad image of India amongst expats,” said Vivek Sidhu, Director, KURUMA Travels Pvt Ltd.

The duo opened their first office in the village Munirka in New Delhi in 2014. It was an 8X8 feet basement shop that could hardly accommodate three chairs.

“But we decided to work with honesty and commitment with our Japanese clients with hired cars as we didn’t have the financial capability to purchase our own vehicles. In the beginning, as we were new in the industry, it was difficult to even hire a car for our clients. We had to deposit a 3-month security amount to get the same. But slowly, we earned the confidence of our clients and started to thrive in our business. Today we are proud of managing a fleet of over 2000 cars in our network with over 210 Japanese companies and some Koreans too as our clients,” said Vivek Sidhu.

The company now has three offices in India – New Delhi (Gurugram), Noida, and Bengaluru. It’s a professionally managed organization with its own corporate core values, vision, and mission statement to its credit.

KURUMA Travel’s storyline “Making Better lives in India,” says – We understand the challenges of Japanese expats and other foreign corporates relocating to India for a longer tenure for work commitments. It’s not easy to fit into an environment that might seem alien at first. Major issues concerning multinational companies and foreign expats include Language Barriers, Safety & Security, Accommodation, and Travelling from one place to another.

Equipped with its core values – customer centricity, self-accountability, inclusivity, personalization, and Kaizen, KURUMA Travels seems committed to making the world one place to pursue everyone’s goal.

While rolling out the company’s future plans, Co-founder and MD Bijendra Singh said that KURUMA Travels aimed at diversifying its operations and expanding its customer base from other expats communities in India including Korea, and ASEAN as well. “We project to achieve an annual turnover of INR 100 crore ( US$ 13 Million) from existing INR 23 Crores (US$ 3 Million) by the year 2024-25, and create a network of over 5000 cars across India.”

When asked why Asian expats only, Singh said that since the Asian expats confront issues such as the language barrier, and were not comfortable opening up too much to strangers, they needed a special kind of service that was based on trust, punctuality, and commitment.

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